Working on the Italian island of Elba during the spring of 2017, Fritz Bornstück moved his studio outside and painted en plein air. This gesture, perhaps appears old fashioned and out of touch with contemporary art practices at a glance.

But Fritz Bornstück seems to have discovered a new lightness and openness towards the landscape in his paintings through this simple working process of going out, collecting material and returning to the studio.

Combining oil painting and textile collage,the colour palette is very much inspired by a 19th century approach, with Fritz Bornstück working like an impressionist in the field, while at the same time turning the works around to pull them in a decidedly more contemporary direction, inflicting contrasting architecture and items on the classical compositions.

The atmosphere in the paintings is uncertain and ambiguous, and the landscapes lose their affinity to "the real world" and become non-places, or perhaps more precisely: places out of time, places out of place, mythological outside of any mythos. Fritz Bornstück's works move in the realm between meaning and non-meaning, between bizarre and common, between absurd and straightforward. The discarded objects that form the creature-like structures or structure-like creatures am, when placed in the nature of Elba, almost like phantasms flickering in the bright sunshine reflected in the azure sea.

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